Something to try in 2012: GTD + Personal Kanban

Over the Christmas holiday I spent some time reflecting on my personal productivity system, and came to a conclusion that is helping me a lot so far.

GTD is great for capturing, reviewing and prioritizing my actions, but I've always had a bit of a hard time working from my task list. There's just too many tasks! I end up cycling through tasks, wasting time and not getting as much done as I feel I should. The stress of seeing my enormous (about 400 next actions) list became a barrier.

What I did was this. I combined GTD (for capturing, reviewing and prioritizing) and Personal Kanban for the "do" part of the process. I've been using it for a couple of weeks and it's pretty sweet.

My tools:
Toodledo premium subscriber for several years now
A whiteboard, with sections labeled "backlog", "this week", "today", "doing", "waiting for", and "done". This week has a max of 20 notes, today has a max of 7, doing has a max of 1, and waiting for has a max of 4.

My process:
GTD Weekly review: review, reflect, and plan the coming week. Put a star on each action I want to accomplish that week. Then write a short headline for each task on a small colored sticky note, and put it on my board in the "this week" section.
The stickies are color-coded for my various projects and areas of focus.
I sort them in priority order.
At the start of each day I pick a maximum of 7 actions, in priority order, and move them to "today".
As I work through the day, I pick an action and move it to "doing" and do it. This is a great way to force focus and cut down on procrastination.
When I complete an action, I cheer and move it to "done".
If the action is waiting for someone else, I move it to "waiting for" and move on to the next one.

Pretty simple, and the visual nature of a Kanban board is great for showing me where I'm procrastinating, the color-coded stickies show the relative balance between my projects and areas of focus. And most importantly, it prevents me from being paralyzed by a 400-action list.

I highly recommend doing a search for "personal kanban" and giving it a try.

To answer (as best I can) your questions:
1. I work from home, so my Kanban board is in my home office.
2. I don't share it, because of the above.
However, there are various online alternatives if you want to share your board with others. My wife and I were looking into http://listhings.com which is awesome, and free. It may allow sharing, but I've not looked into it.
Another great one is http://kanbanery.com/ which I think is free for basic subscription.
At the moment I'm playing with the Chrome add-on called "Pomodoro Daisuki", which is: free, entirely local (no Internet required), has a built-in Pomodoro timer, and fits nicely on my second monitor.

3. Not sure how I could gather the effectiveness data without a lot of work (non-action-completing overhead). Looking at my Toodledo task completion statistics (https://www.toodledo.com/tools/stats.php), I see that I've been completing between 4-8 actions per day, which is higher than before the Christmas holidays. But there's a huge error-bar associated with those numbers. :)

Ha, Emily,
I wish there were a hook from paper to plastic... I mean from my GTD planner to my phone calendar. I use the phone for reminders with data (conference call info and reminders, birthdays, anniversaries for employees and clients etc.) I had a phone that crashed twice and I lost EVERYTHING stored in it after I'd migrated completely to my phone and I'm really gun shy to move back to electronic tracking.

I also just like to see everything at a glance and my BlackBerry's screen is WAY too small for good weekly viewing at a glance.

So now I haul around my GTD planner bought at the local office supply store for an overwhelming $60. (most of it for the fancy leather 3-ring binder!) But I do love the sections and agendas by person. I wasn't keeping lists by person and client/account before GTD. I use it heavily but I don't want to rewrite the data that people email so I use the paper for a reminder to check the phone.

I also use Kanban in combination with GTD but in a slightly different manner. I use a card for "a project" (by the GTD-definition) to limit the number of open loops caused by starting too many multi-step projects. I then have subtasks on each card for individual next actions and tag the card with context-tags (as "call", "mail" etc if applicable). I have found AgileZen to be a really good tool for this workflow and it is free for personal use.